Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 83.djvu/9

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THE

POPULAR SCIENCE

MONTHLY


JULY, 1913




ANCIENT MAN, HIS ENVIRONMENT AND HIS ART

By GEORGE GRANT MacCURDY

ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ARCHEOLOGY IN YALE UNIVERSITY

THE relation of culture to the environment is always a fruitful theme for discussion. To minimize the difficulties in the way of reconstructing the environment of the earliest races of man would be to deny the all-pervasive influence of environment as a factor in human development. We are so accustomed to think in terms of our own surroundings that any other set strikes us at once as strange and unreal. This is particularly true when we attempt at one fell swoop to divest

Fig. 1. A Great Mousterian Rock Shelter, where a female skeleton of the Neanderthal type was recently found. Photographed by G. G. MacCurdy.